Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China

Description

On the eve of International Women's Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause celebre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting an unprecedented awakening among China's urban, educated women. In Betraying Big Brother, journalist and scholar Leta Hong Fincher argues that the popular, broad-based movement poses the greatest threat to China's authoritarian regime today. Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the challenges they face and their "joy of betraying Big Brother," as Wei Tingting-one of the Feminist Five-wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness through online campaigns resembling #MeToo, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.

LETA HONG FINCHER is a journalist who has written for New York Times, The Guardian, Ms. Magazine, BBC and CNN, and is the author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China.

[Praise for Leftover Women] A chilling account of the pressures on Chinese strivers ... One hopes that Leftover Women will soon be translated into Chinese, as it is likely to resonate deeply with urban educated women. It seems the party has forgotten the Mao-era dictum: 'Women Hold Up Half the Sky' * New York Times * [Praise for Leftover Women]Leftover Women should carry a health warning: this book will severely raise your blood pressure. Leta Hong Fincher's subject - researched through statistical analysis, sociological surveys and extensive first-hand interviewing - is the toxic vitality of sexism in China today. * Guardian * [Praise for Leftover Women] Important and interesting...gender relations, in many ways so much more advanced in China than in India, are going backwards as traditions that were seemingly flattened by Mao re-emerge. * Financial Times * [Praise for Leftover Women] In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher convincingly argues that an orchestrated state campaign co-opts women to marry and buy marital homes, often to the detriment of their careers and financial independence. * Wall Street Journal * [Praise for Leftover Women] A compelling piece of original research...Leta Hong Fincher, an American journalist-turned-academic, argues that the same party that pushed through the elevation of women's status in the 1950s is now trying to engineer their return to the kitchen. * Economist *